Part of Manor Yard, Symondsbury

The Colfox family have dropped controversial plans to convert the historic Manor Yard into a wedding venue with six wedding / holiday homes and 100 car parking spaces.

Instead the 18th century stable block in Mill Lane is going to be converted into six modern craft workshops which it is hoped will attract visitors from across the country. The target date for completion is October 2011.

Julia Colfox is now Managing Director of Symondsbury Farms Ltd, and in control of developments, replacing an agent (Pineapple Rural of Salway Ash).

The Symondsbury Farms estate consists of about 1,500 acres, and although agriculture still accounts for the biggest proportion of its income, the Colfox family are keen to diversify.

There are also plans to revamp Crepe Farm (approved application; others have been withdrawn, eg shop and restaurant) and Axen Farm (shooting lodge and holiday accommodation).

A letter about Symondsbury’s Whole Farm Plan written in May 2010 by Pineapple’s Andrew Dyke revealed that annual income was projected to rise to £986,000 by 2013/14, compared to an estimated £723,000 for 2009/10. The letter also details environmental improvements.

Manor Yard

A statement issued by Symondsbury Farms Ltd has said “quite frankly” that Manor Yard is an “eyesore”.

About 90% of the roof is covered in sheeting.

The stable block has been covered in tarpaulins for seven years. West Dorset District Council served notice five years ago that urgent improvements were required – a notice was served under section 54 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act, 1990.

The craft workshops plan was approved in February 2009, as – planners said – “an excellent opportunity to breathe new life into a vulnerable collection of historically significant buildings”.

The scheme got put to one side when an application went in for a wedding venue – but that application was recently withdrawn. (It would have meant the loss of 13 full time jobs).

Skilled workers in rural crafts

Now – says the Symondsbury Farms statement – “The objective is to attract skilled workers in rural crafts and for the public to be able to come and see them at work.

“The Pottery run by Miles Bell and Wendy Lees’ Herb Nursery will remain on site with the former relocating to a new building.

“Bridport is already gaining a national reputation as a thriving historic market town with its artists’ community and annual literary festival to name but two of its assets.

“It is very much anticipated that the new complex will become an attraction and destination for those visiting Bridport and whilst adding to this reputation will, as importantly, be see by the inhabitants of Symondsbury as in keeping with its environment as well as being a real asset within their community.”

Manor Yard has been an important place of work in Symondsbury for 500 years.

HAVE YOU heard from “Race to Infinity”? Sounds a bit Toy Story but is it child’s play? If you think your broadband connection is slower than what you’re actually paying for, read on because if Beaminster and Bridport’s votes are anything to go by, West Dorset is not even in the race. Yet.

BT are conducting a survey for the establishment of their superfast fibre optic Broadband within the UK called Infinity Services. Have we got a chance in West Dorset to even get what some of us already pay for but are not getting: a fast connection?

Well… five areas of the UK (yes 5) with the largest percentage of votes by 31 December 2010 will win the chance to be the lucky BT’s Infinity race winners. ‘Chance to win’ never guarantees anything in my books but lack of trying certainly guarantees failure.

So, before you go and vote please tell all your friends, your colleagues, your neighbours, your parents and whatever you do please don’t forget your silver surfer friends. We do live in West Dorset after all. Only 8 people have voted for Beaminster out of 1,800, Bridport is marginally better with 38 votes out of 8,110 (on Monday 25 October 2010).

Our neighbours Weymouth will probably be on fast track mode thanks to the Olympics but let’s face it, Beaminster, Bridport or Sherborne may well be in West Dorset too, it doesn’t mean we’ll have any of that legacy. Go on, it takes a minute, does not cost a penny and it’s nice to be full of hope once in a while…

To Infinity and Beyond? Go: http://on.fb.me/c0Fn20

The Old Swan at Toller Porcorum. Photograph by Nigel Mykura, reused under Creative Commons Licence.

PALMERS Brewery has put The Old Swan pub at Toller Porcorum up for auction.

The building is being offered for sale on a 999-year lease with a covenant that it should remain as a pub and a tie requiring Palmers’ beer to be sold. The guide price is £175,000. Palmers’ property agents Chesterton Humberts will conduct the auction at 3pm on December 16 in Toller Porcorum village hall.

The pub has been closed for 12 years, prompting a long campaign for its reopening – or sale on the open market – by the SOS Toller Save Our Old Swan group (whose latest thoughts can be read in this front-page story in the View From Bridport newspaper and in this piece in the Western Gazette and this article in the Bridport News).

John Palmer, managing director of Palmers Brewery, said: ‘It is now a year since we wrote to the Save Our Swan group offering to let them the pub rent-free for five years.

‘We have not received any response to our proposal and having waited a year, it is time to move things on.

‘Palmers have therefore decided to put the pub on the open market at a realistic guide price.

‘We are offering The Old Swan for sale to give the widest opportunity for it to reopen as a pub.’

The guide price reflects the findings of three recent valuations by independent specialists in the licensed property market, all with local knowledge.

Palmers originally closed The Old Swan because the costs of essential modernisation greatly outweighed the likely value of the business. Last year, Palmers re-assessed the costs and found that modernisation was still commercially unviable. This year, Savills carried out an independent report for West Dorset District Council, which validated Palmers’ views on the pub’s commercial unviability. The report concluded that the high cost of reconfiguration was due to the demands of modern regulations and the changing expectations of customers.

Updated Friday morning (October 22): By coincidence, the whole of the front page of this week’s Morning Advertiser (“officially the pub trade’s favourite”) is about community take-overs of pubs.

The lead story is about the Pub is the Hub rural regeneration scheme and community leases of pubs judged by their existing owners to be unviable. The New Inn at Shipton Gorge near Bridport is highlighted in this piece, and it also gets a feature all of its own.

Villagers in Shipton Gorge took over The New Inn on a lease from Palmers Brewery.    

In the lead story, Mike Clayton, the former Managing Director of Jennings Brothers who is now an advisor to the Pub is the Hub, is quoted as saying: “In some circumstances, communities instinctively say we must buy the pub.

“But we are saying you don’t have to find the capital to buy it if you can take on some sort of lease agreement. Obviously, it depends on the terms of the lease and the rent.”

The Morning Advertiser then quotes Eddie Buck, chairman of the not-for-profit company New Inn Support that holds the lease of the New Inn in Shipton Gorge.

Mr Buck is quoted as saying: “No way could we have found the money to buy the freehold as a community.

“A lease was the only option and the brewery has been very reasonable with us.”

Click on this line to read a PDF of the Pub is the Hub story and The New Inn feature.

(If you’d like to read more in The Morning Advertiser about co-operatives, you’ll have to register on its website to read its digital edition).  

Editor’s Note: The original story here drew on a press release issued on Thursday, October 21, by Palmers Brewery. The Save Our Swan group was then asked for a comment. Members met to discuss what they should do next and prepare an official response to journalists’ queries.

It should be noted that I work for Watershed PR, which does PR for Palmers Brewery. That’s why there’s been nothing about Palmers on this site for several months, apart from comments on old stories such as those about The Market House in Bridport, and (now I think about it) passing mentions in pieces about Bridport Gig Rowing Club.

The news about The Old Swan was published here simply because it’s newsworthy, and I wrote about the pub last year. There’s a link to that piece in the fourth paragraph of the story above.

I had nothing to do with The Old Swan press release before it came out.

Further updated on October 31 with details of the time and place of the auction.

The move is designed to ensure that Amsafe Bridport – based at The Court in West Street – gives the aviation industry what it wants.

Amsafe Bridport's base at The Court in West Street, Bridport. Photograph copyright Roger Cornfoot, reused under Creative Commons Licence.

One of the things the industry wants is less weight on board aircraft. Less weight means lower fuel costs.

Last year AmSafe Bridport introduced a lightweight cargo pallet net specifically designed to cut weight.

Now it’s bought “certain intellectual property and other assets” of Hoffmann Air Cargo Equipment (Hoffmann ACE), a privately-held company based in Friedberg that specialises in making high-tech pallet nets.

Hoffmann ACE is known for its investment in research and development, and it was unique in offering the lightest air cargo nets in the world made with a fibre called Dyneema. Dyneema is the world’s strongest fibre.

Now, Amsafe is the world’s leading supplier of palletised cargo nets, but Hoffmann prided itself on being technologically “one step ahead” of the competition.

In layman’s terms, it looks like it was one step ahead of Amsafe Bridport, which couldn’t beat it, so it bought it.

The cost has not been disclosed.

Ian Kentfield is head of commercial cargo for AmSafe Bridport. He’s based in Hong Kong, so I haven’t yet been able to speak him directly, but via Amsafe’s American HQ he’s quoted as saying:

“We are excited to bring Hoffmann’s knowledge and innovation into our business. AmSafe is committed to developing highly engineered solutions for the world’s cargo market; and with the addition of the Hoffmann ACE assets, we are now able to offer our customers additional lightweight products that improve fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.”

Rope, net and twine have shaped Bridport’s history for centuries. In recent years, the industry has got more and more international, a process best described in Richard Sims’ excellent book Rope, Net & Twine: The Bridport Textile Industry (Dovecote Press, 2009). Amsafe Bridport’s deal with Hoffmann ACE continues the trend towards globalisation.

Hoffmann ACE employs 60 people worldwide, eight in Germany, the rest in Turkey, China and the USA.

Another convenience, AKA rather pricey, shop has opened.

When the editor of this site asked me to take a look at the establishment my first reaction was that he had taken leave of his senses and gone as far round the bend as I am. I really don’t go in for a lot of grocery shopping. Reviewing pubs yes, restaurants, if I have to, or even knocking shops at a push, but the weekly grub and cleaning materials grab and I are normally as total strangers.

Anyway I did take a swan along there and have a look. My first reaction was – why? What is it all about? Why has a company spent a considerable amount of money to provide a service that will prove of great value to those needing a bar of ordinary chocolate during the hike from Waterstone’s to Bridport Sports and very few others?

It beats me, but I know as much about high finance as I do about doing the weekly shop.

Although it is clean, well lit and pleasant-looking, it offers nothing that either the locally-owned Threshers franchise next door or the first-rate newsagents on the corner of Barrack Street don’t. Plus, they offer a wider choice of what they do sell, and at less cost, than the new painted lady in their midst.

So is it unneeded and unwanted or have I got it totally wrong?

Time and the wallets and purses of the populace of Bridport will tell.

I can see no need for it.

Having said all that, I really do wish them well. They have turned a desolate ruin in the middle of town into an attractive, cheery and inviting shop. They have employed local people, which is a positive bonus in these straitened times and they are paying their business rates, which will benefit us all.

So good luck SPAR – but why the hell did you do it?

The digital edition is produced by View From Publishing, based in Lyme Regis.

It’s aimed at a younger audience than the View From’s five conventionally-printed free weekly newspapers.

Sources say that users registered to receive the Weekender are generally “a lot younger” than the readers of the free weeklies.

About two-thirds of those signed up are looking regularly at the online paper, which comes out on Friday afternoons.

Adverts in the Weekender are not yet being sold separately. That is due to happen when 2,000 people have registered. The target date set is the end of May.

Current Weekender ads are sell-ons from the company’s printed titles.

Kingston Maurward College, just outside Dorchester, is sponsoring a four-page wrap in this week’s View From newspapers, promoting the Weekender.

One View From source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “We don’t know whether it will work but we’re having a go. Response from those who have registered has been very positive.”

Editor’s Note: The Weekender is well worth looking at. (There’s a link here).

Firstly, because it’s not got many ads, it’s much more compact and attractive, much less sprawling than the printed newspapers.

Secondly, because it’s trying to fill the gap at the end of the week that’s been gaping ever since the Bridport News and Lyme Regis News moved Friday to Thursday and then to Wednesday.

Thirdly, if you like that kind of thing, it has an intriguing and well-informed Dorset Media Watch column by The Chronicler. I don’t know who The Chronicler is. It also has a nice feature about other Dorset websites (and, no, in case you’re wondering, it hasn’t included this one).

Fourthly, the Weekender is changing the West Dorset media landscape, just as much as moves by the Northcliffe-owned Western Gazette and the Newsquest-owned Bridport News and Lyme Regis News. These things are worth keeping an eye on, it seems to me, because they do shape how a place and its people think about themselves, discuss local issues, decide what’s important, and so on. I suppose that sounds a bit worthy, but it’s true!

Spot the difference: Sherborne looks like it is going to be central to the Western Gazette's future coverage of West Dorset.

THE WESTERN Gazette has merged its West Dorset edition with its Sherborne edition.

The move has been badly received by readers such as Bill Gray, 60, of Bridport, who said: “It’s rubbish, that paper.”

In the 1990s, the Gazette was one of the biggest weekly newspapers in the country, with a dozen or so different editions.

But its sales have been steadily declining, and its shrinkage this spring is the latest in a series of changes ripping through the West Dorset media landscape.

The West Dorset – Sherborne merger comes three weeks after the Bridport News and Lyme Regis News moved their publication day to Wednesday and increased their pagination to 80 pages. The News titles have launched new features and initiatives, as have the competing View From free weeklies. (The View From titles also come out on Wednesday; the Gazette is published on Thursday). 

The Gazette still has four reporters covering West and North Dorset, and it dedicates space to Dorset court reporting.

Gazette staff – speaking unofficially – say the merger is meant to give a better service to readers across West Dorset by providing a spread of news relevant to the whole district. Sherborne, Bridport, and Beaminster are all covered by West Dorset District Council, and all fall within the Bishopric of Sherborne. Indeed, viewed historically, Sherborne is the ancient capital of Wessex.

But, around Bridport, potential buyers were not keen to keep paying 60p for the newly merged paper. Comments included:

“It’s a waste of time.”

“They’ve killed it.”

“I’m not interested in the Western Gazette – I don’t know why anybody would buy it.”

“I suppose it depends on how much coverage poor old West Dorset gets.”

“If I was in the shop and I saw that [SHERBORNE in bold letters on the masthead, WEST DORSET smaller and fainter underneath] I’d think it’s not the local one and I wouldn’t buy it.”

“It’s rubbish, that paper, there’s nothing in there of any interest to anybody in Bridport, what there is has already been in the Bridport News.”

“If they managed to come up with a fantastic story about Bridport that nobody else had got, then I might buy the paper, but otherwise no, it’s boring.”

The average weekly sale of the Western Gazette’s West Dorset edition was 2,663 in 2009, according to official ABC figures. Sherborne’s tally was 2,841.

The vox pops above suggest the Gazette will struggle this year to do better in West Dorset.

The Gazette was asked last week for its own official comments, but no response has been received.

Editor’s Note: I had hoped to find more enthusiasm for the Western Gazette. In recent months it has published good stories on subjects like the South West Quadrant, planning applications in West Bay Road, Cattistock playground and Dorchester town centre. I’m interested in Sherborne news and I know there is traffic from West Dorset to Sherborne for pubs (eg The Digby Tap), shops (eg Booklore, Buzz, Fired Earth, the Pear Tree Delicatessen, the Toy Barn, etc) and grand structures like the Abbey and the two castles. But everyone I spoke to was scornful of the merged edition.

The Western Gazette is published by Northcliffe, best known as the regional arm of the company which publishes The Daily Mail. It’s possible Northcliffe sees more of a future in the west and south of Dorset for its websites www.dorchesterpeople.co.uk and www.weymouthpeople.co.uk Dorchester in particular is regarded as prime territory for rounding up Daily Mail readers.

Last year Northcliffe also considered launching a bridportpeople site. In total (I was told by a Northcliffe manager) the company has registered 3,000 domain names nationwide, covering towns with a population of more than 10,000 people.

Meanwhile, View From Publishing is experimenting with an online newspaper called the Dorset Weekender, while the Bridport News, Lyme Regis News and Dorset Echo – all owned by Newsquest - are conducting surveys to see how people interact with their websites.

The Bridport News (which, in circulation terms, includes the Lyme Regis News) is down to an average sale of 9,627 across every month of 2009. That’s a drop year-on-year of 116 copies from 9,743 (I was wrong in a comment on another story on this website to rely on my memory and suggest the circulation was 10,001).

Anyway, a drop of 116 copies doesn’t look too bad but the month-by-month figures for 2009 make far more interesting reading. As the official ABC certificate reveals, circulation crept up from 9,451 in January 2009 to a peak of 10,054 in July, and then it went down every month apart from one, until by December it was 8,837. The run up to Christmas can disrupt sales – who wants to spend Christmas Day reading a tedious “Review of the Year” in their local newspaper? – but even so that is a big drop. Hence perhaps the BN’s New Year offensive with more pages, new features, a fresh masthead slogan, and so on.

The Western Gazette is down over the last six months of 2009 to an average of 30, 789 (in December it was 29,192). Over the last two years the Gazette’s circulation has dropped by about 5,000.

Its West Dorset edition now sells on average 2,663 copies; the Sherborne edition shifts 2,841.

The population of West Dorset is about 97,000.

In the blue corner, the BN – 40p, published by Newsquest (owned by the giant American corporation Gannett), 64 pages (including 10 of the crucial property pages),  physically smaller than the VF.  

In the red corner, the VF, published by Lyme Media & Events Ltd (owned by a former St Albans publisher, who also owns the Mariners Hotel in Lyme Regis), 64 pages (including 10 of the crucial property pages), bigger pages than the BN.

First pages, first impressions

The BN has a new battlecry – YOUR TOWN, YOUR PAPER. Good and punchy, but what if you live in a village? Is the BN really going to focus just on Bridport? What about Beaminster? Or does it think that people will read “your town” as covering that?

BN Page 1: Big capitalised white-on-black negative headline: “WHAT A WASTE – Fury over £300,000 cost of finding new transfer site for rubbish”. Nice use of red to pick out the £300,000.

VF Page 1: Smaller lower-case “Leisure centre celebrates windfall”. This is about Bridport’s leisure centre getting a lottery grant of £315,000.

Odd how the two sums of money are so close, in this classic bad news / good news split (or hard news and soft news, depending on which terms you prefer).

At this stage, both papers are definitely looking like contenders. But which lead will appeal more to most local people in terms of their everyday lives? You must decide for yourself, but I’d be inclined to say the latter… 

However, there is also another way of looking at things - old news versus new news - and as my first correspondent has leapt in to say:

“The lottery award was on page 2 of the BN last week. The VF story is in more detail but the news is over a week old.

“VF still has an appalling masthead- far too busy, badly designed and looks cheap. It doesn’t need the bottom strap line announcing it to be Bridport’s very own community newspaper, ­ it’s meaningless and takes up a cm of space at the bottom.

“First round to the BN.”

Another email describes the BN’s lead story as “a move away from the sub-Jeremy Kyle style fodder we’ve been getting of late”.

But continues: “The Your Town, Your Paper thing is meaningless. What does it mean? If it was people’s paper they would already know. It’s like the 1980s, Maxwell’s Mirror, Forward with the people – and we know what happened to him.

“Where do the BN’s profits go? Not to the Bridport paper, not to Dorset, not even the UK….

“The VF still needs to tidy up its page 2. They have the telephone number of its offices in no less than three places.  And do we really need to have the number of the designers?

“It’s too featuresy – the 60 second interview should be moved further back.”          

And another – I ought to be charging Newsquest and Lyme Media for running this impromptu focus group. But do they want to hear what’s said, let alone pay me? (That’s a rhetorical question, not a hopeful plea, by the way).

“Interesting, the Bridport News’s splash is 1,300+ words long. Much longer than the previous few weeks. But clearly the investigating has been done by NOWTS not Bridport News staffers.

“Page 2 BN is ok, the stories are very long (round 2 to BN)

“Page 3 BN is a good story! But is in all the rivals and was covered by the VF, clearly a press release. Good headline though.

“Interesting 4/5 BN, rather like BN was a while back.

“Last week the page 6 BN story would have been the splash – have advertisers complained?

“BN’s page 7 is the VF’s page 3.

“Nice pic on page 8 of BN.

“The VF is still running pancake stories and far too much “charridee stuff” and as for the Axminster-based Summer Holiday it makes no sense for a so-called hyperlocal paper.

“The VF takes no account of design… the BN has a very good design sub and that saves the paper.

“Overall, the BN has it, although this may be because people still send it press releases and the View From needs to work harder on design.

“However, the VF has pushed its Ents coverage and it does look better than the BN’s. If the VF’s new owner cares about news the VF could be a real contender.

“There are still no words on the front of the BN indicating it’s stuck with the tabloid style of the Dorset Echo – which may be fine in Weymouth but not really in Bridport.

“Design aside, the big question is: Is there enough unique content to make the BN worth the 40p cost?

“The answer will be worth noting when the next circulation figures come out.”

Some more of my own thoughts, quickly.

I rather like the bustling feel of the VF’s masthead, although it is suffering by showing Woolworths still open. It closed in Bridport – what – a year ago?

The VF’s Entertainments section is better than the BN’s and should provide a strong basis for the VF’s new Friday online newspaper, the Dorset Weekender, starting in March. More could have been done with the Summer Holiday piece to make, for example, the links across West Dorset clearer. 

The interview on page 2 of the VF is always a good read, and you can make a case for it staying where it is, because it suggests that this is a paper about local people. The whole page devoted to a personal profile further into the paper reinforces this.   

The story about the comedian Reginald D. Hunter not showing up at the Electric Palace  because he was on was the BBC’s new programme The Bubble (VF, p3: BN, p7) is an indication of how so-called newspapers – both the BN and the VF – are being left behind. You could find out about this on Twitter days ago.  

There is indeed a lovely pic on p8 of the BN, by a member of the public (Shane Pym, former landlord of the Bottle Inn in Marshwood, and before that, if memory serves, once a lorry driver in Rwanda).

The pictures in We’re In The News in the BN (pages 26-27) are all taken by professional photographer Graham Hunt. What happened to the idea of people sending their own in? Have people given up already, or is it just a result of the publication day shifting to a Wednesday?

Expanding the Looking Back section in the BN is a good idea, and there’s a great selection of photos this week courtesy of local collector Keith Alner.  Running this kind of feature should allow more time for the BN’s staff to do more original reporting.

That would be good – because what would really make a difference, in all the 128 pages of the BN and VF combined, is more original reporting, more life, more sparkle, not just from the towns, but from the villages too.

Is that too much to ask for these days?

My favourite thing

I’ve spent too long today looking at, and thinking about, local newspapers. I’ve alternated between feelings of admiration for the often resourceful ways they keep on going (genuinely respectful feelings in the case of the VF) and fury – as the BN would doubtless have it – at the pitiful crumminess of some of their content. I can’t bring myself to write about the BN page 9 lead:  man – on Portland – complains about postal surcharge…    

So I’ll end this almost-certainly-never-to-be-repeated exercise with my favourite thing in this week’s BN; the last line of the letter by Geoff Yaxley, of Silver Street, Lyme Regis, about the working party being set up in Lyme Regis to discuss the future of the Three Cups Hotel. Mr Yaxley writes about hundreds of people voting for the compulsory purchase of the Three Cups, then concludes:

“I am the only person who views this new working party with scepticism.”

Good on you mate!      

The move is announced on the papers’ website but not (that I can see) in the papers themselves.

The shift means the two Newsquest publications will come out on the same morning as the free newspapers View From Bridport, View From Beaminster and View From Lyme Regis.

“The Bridport News and Lyme Regis News moving to Wednesday is purely for operational reasons relating to available press slots,” says Toby Granville, editor of the Dorset Echo, who also oversees the two weeklies.

View From editor Philip Evans comments (via Twitter): “@RealWestDorset By moving to a Wednesday publishing date they lose their only exclusive news day to the View. Great decision – for the View!”

Analysis

Myself, I think there are three things worth remarking on.

One: when the News did first move from Friday to Thursday that was done to compete more directly with View From titles and the Western Gazette (which comes out on Thursdays). Yet I know people who still dislike that shift intensely and refuse, as a matter of principle, to buy the News on a Thursday, because they believe it should still come out on a Friday. That’s a powerful testament to the strength of the connection that the News had with people, and to the force of habit. It’s Friday: it’s Bridport / Lyme Regis News day. Friday was a crucial part of the papers’ brand identity. Changing to a Thursday affected that, but perhaps moving to a Wednesday will not, particularly, because the first move was the one that showed the brand could be tampered with. Like ITV’s News at Ten; there are people who have never seen that in quite the same way since ITV began moving it around…

Another comment via Twitter: “oninbridders @RealWestDorset Bridport News belongs to Friday, a nice way to end the week, sort it out @Dorsetecho. Though at this rate it will loop back”

Two: it will interesting to see what effect it has, three editions of the View From and two editions of the News coming out on the same day, midweek. All sorts of permutations are possible. Good for the View because people might choose to pick up a free paper rather than pay for one that is now covering exactly the same last week? Good for the News because it’s got more pages at the moment than it’s had for years and people might think that a paid-for publication is always going to be superior to a free? Or good for them both because, if you’re in the shop, why not get them both? Neither is going to want to have exactly the same content as the other so they should (in theory) both get better and more various.

Three: and what of the 60p Western Gazette, which fewer people in West Dorset seem to care about these days, despite the best efforts of its local reporter Danielle Hoffman? (It was noticeable, for example, that she turned up for the recent South West Quadrant appeal hearing whereas no one from the News was seen – a situation that people commented upon.) Alas for the Western Gazette, it won’t have much of an “exclusive news day” to itself on Wednesdays because the deadline for its West Dorset edition is late on Tuesday. Oh well.

Postscript

View From Publications are now planning something for Fridays called the View Online Dorset Weekender – “a brand new weekly paper you’ll only be able to read online!”